The Murder of Twelve

by Jessica Fletcher

  At that point I could see a man behind the wheel who was slumped backward in the seat as if he were taking a nap. His mouth had locked open in a crooked fashion and his gaze was utterly empty. I also noted the discolored patch of gravel directly in line with the vehicle’s tailpipe and figured that for a clear indicator that he’d died of carbon monoxide poisoning. Either suicide, which seemed unlikely, or a tragic accident after he’d drifted off to sleep with the engine still running and windows all closed up tight.

  Force of habit led me to touch the tailpipe, only to find it cold and dry even at the end. While Mort crouched with his hands on his knees to peer inside the cab, I moved to the hood and found it similarly cool to the touch, indicating the victim behind the wheel had likely been dead for some time. The road off which the factory mill was located was hardly ever traversed, and even the nearest main road, Route 1, saw little traffic these days. This dying, or already dead, part of Cabot Cove stood in stark contrast to the parts of our village that were thriving closer to the coast and the center of town. I imagined there were stretches when you could count on your fingers the number of vehicles that passed down this road for days at a time, which explained why the Sheriff’s Department didn’t know of the car’s presence, or of the dead man inside, until Deputy Andy spotted it during his rounds. The corpse of the man slumped behind the wheel looked lonely more than anything else amid the otherwise empty gravel parking lot. And, come to think of it, “lonely” was as good a way as any to describe the Cabot Manufacturing Company itself in its current state.

  Mort pulled on his evidence gloves, which looked identical to the pair Seth squeezed over both hands in order to examine the deceased. Mort found the Ford Five Hundred’s driver-side door in pristine condition and unlocked. When he eased it open, the dead body rocked and nearly spilled out.

  “Yup,” Seth said after a brief examination of the corpse, “it was carbon monoxide poisoning all right, almost for sure.” He ran a small penlight about the man’s face to better regard the skin’s texture and tone. “You can tell by the cherry pink coloring of the skin. Yup, plain as day in my mind.”

  “Accident or suicide, Doc?” Mort asked him.

  “Hard to say at this point. Suicides normally snake a tube inside the car from the tailpipe to quicken the procedure, but there’s no indication of that here, obviously, which leads me to believe the victim parked, left his engine on to stay warm, then drifted off to sleep . . . and death.”

  “Can you get his wallet for me, Doc?”

  I watched Seth maneuver the body, and his gloved hands, to fish the wallet from the man’s back pocket. He handed it over to Mort, who eased it open as I looked on. We saw the distinctive ID at the same time, above a chintzy-looking badge.

  “Loomis Winslow, private eye out of Boston,” Mort noted, flapping the wallet, more an ID case, in the air. “Must not have noticed the ‘Welcome to Cabot Cove’ sign. Anybody in their right mind sees that and turns around.”

  “Tell that to the summer people, Sheriff,” Seth said, continuing his preliminary examination of the body.

  “After you tell me how long he’s been dead.”

  “Since late last night or very early this morning, based on the settling of the blood and level of rigor mortis. Say as much as twelve hours, as few as six.”

  Mort turned toward me. “Here’s how I see it, Mrs. F. Man pulls into an abandoned parking lot to make a phone call or something and falls asleep with the engine on to keep warm. Must’ve had the misfortune to have enough gas left in the tank to make sure he never woke up again. Case solved.”

  “It doesn’t bother you that he happened to be a private investigator?”

  “Why should it?”

  “Because somebody must have hired him,” I said. “And whatever he was hired for must’ve been important enough for him to head north with a blizzard in the forecast.”

  Seth cocked his gaze our way. “She’s got a point, Sheriff.”

  Mort took his cap off and scratched at his head again. “Have you ever seen a dead body you didn’t think was murdered, Mrs. F.?”

  My gaze drifted to the body in the driver’s seat. “He unclasped his seat belt.”

  “So?”

  “If he pulled in just to make a call, maybe check his directions or just get his bearings, he wouldn’t have done that—at least most people wouldn’t.”

  Mort rolled his eyes. “Here we go.”

  I could feel the wind picking up, blowing in that dreaded direction indicating a classic nor’easter was coming. “Think about it,” I told him.

  “Do I have to?” Mort turned back toward the car, maybe trying to pretend I wasn’t there at all. “Any signs of trauma, Doc? Like maybe somebody conked him on the head and left the guy with the engine on to kill him?”

  “No, sirree, Sheriff, least nothing I can find. Near as I can tell, Mr. Winslow here slipped off to sleep and died while he was dreaming.”

  “Any objections, Mrs. F.?” Mort asked me.

  I had my eyes still fixed inside the Ford Five Hundred. “Well . . .”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “Can I borrow your penlight?” I asked Seth.

  He handed it over and moved aside so I could replace him leaning over the front seat. But my attention, and the penlight’s beam, were focused on the leather seat upholstery on either side of where Loomis Winslow rested. I thought I’d spotted something there when the body shifted to the left once Mort jerked the door open.

  Turned out I was right.

  Chapter Two

  Notice that?” I asked Mort, who was leaning close enough to my shoulder to make it seem like I was sporting a second head.

  “Notice what?”

  “Parts of the upholstery are discolored on both sides of the body.”

  “Come again, Mrs. F.?”

  “Loomis Winslow went to great pains to keep his car looking showroom bright, including wiping a lubricant like Armor All on the seats. But these less shiny patches indicate to the naked eye something removed the lubricant on both sides of the body, equidistant on either side.”

  “Something,” Mort repeated.

  I turned and eased myself from the car’s cabin. I didn’t dare touch anything without evidence gloves and figured doing so was a task better left to Mort anyway. “See if you feel anything when you touch the discolored spots.”

  “Like what?”

  “If I’m right, you’ll know immediately.”

  Mort leaned in to take over the space I’d just occupied. “Where are these spots, again?”

  I realized I was still holding the penlight and shone its beam on the spot closest to Mort’s reach. Then I watched him touch it with the tip of his right index finger.

  “Sticky,” he noted, and proceeded to touch his gloved fingers to the man’s clothes. “Here, too.”

  I nodded. “Residue from some kind of tape.”

  “Hold on, Jess,” Seth interjected. “Are you saying somebody taped this poor man to the seat and left him to die with the engine running?”

  “That seems to be what happened here, yes.”

  “In which case,” Mort started, “he stuck around long enough for the deed to be done. A couple of hours, at least, to remove the tape and make it look like an accident.”

  Seth took the penlight back and did a fresh inspection of Loomis Winslow’s face. “No tape residue here. Means this man could’ve been screaming up a storm, at least until he passed out.”

  “With no one around to hear him in these parts, Doc,” Mort noted. “If the good lady here is right, we’ve got death by duct tape. Feel free to use that as a book title, Mrs. F.,” Mort added, turning toward me. “No charge.”

  “Why not just cover his mouth, too?” Seth wondered aloud, getting back to the subject at hand.

  “How long would it have taken you to spot signs of that
on the skin of the victim’s face?”

  “Five seconds, maybe.”

  I left things there.

  “I’m thinking I should have left you at Mara’s,” Mort sighed.

  “Crime scene technicians would have spotted the same thing I did.”

  “Sure, but that would’ve been tomorrow. Last thing I need today with a killer storm bearing down is a murder investigation.” Mort stopped and stared as much through me as at me. “You’ve got that look, Mrs. F.”

  “What look is that?’

  “The one that says you’ve got something else to tell me.”

  “I do, Sheriff, and it’s not going to wait until tomorrow either.”

  I took the penlight back from Mort and shone it down into the well beneath the dashboard where the dead man’s legs and feet rested atop one of those fancy floor mats I couldn’t recall the name of, since I don’t own a car and never even got my driver’s license.

  “What do you see, Sheriff?”

  “Dirt.”

  “Gravel,” I corrected.

  “That’s what I said.”

  “Gravel that at first glance seems to match the surface of this parking lot.”

  Mort looked toward Seth. “This just keeps getting better, doesn’t it?”

  “You’re the one who asked her if she wanted to come along.”

  “Excuse me,” I broke in, “but I’m standing right here.”

  “Okay,” Mort said, nodding reluctantly, “so Loomis Winslow stepped out of the car. At least that might explain why he took off his seat belt.”

  “Check his shoes, Mort.”

  “For what?”

  “More gravel. The tread. If he did more than stand outside the car, you’ll find evidence of it there.”

  Mort worked his way into the cab on an angle that allowed him to inspect the soles of Loomis Winslow’s shoes. “Smeared with gravel dust and grit on both sides, left and right,” he reported.

  “How deep into the tread?”

  Mort checked the shoes again. “Deep enough. You thinking the guy took a walk?”

  “I am.”

  “Where, exactly?”

  I pointed over the Ford Five Hundred toward the crumbling remains of the Cabot Manufacturing Company. “I’m guessing inside there.”

  * * *

  * * *

  The inside of the Cabot Manufacturing Company was a warren of collapsed timbers, cobwebs, and decaying flat wooden tables that had once held the lathes and other machines that had made this the largest textile factory in New England for a time. The debris-riddled plank floor formed an obstacle course that left us dancing between objects both big and small. Every time the increasingly stiff wind blew, the building shook and creaked, leaving me glancing upward in fear the roof might be about to shed fresh pieces of itself. It smelled of age and decay, the kind of place you wouldn’t want to hold in your memory once you left it behind. Dust swirled about the air, and I couldn’t help but picture the snow that was to come, leaving a fresh coat of white everywhere the holes in that roof allowed it to enter.

  “What are we looking for, exactly?” Mort asked, kicking at some clumps of rotten wood as if to see what lay beneath it.

  “I’ll tell you when I find it,” I told him, hoping I found it fast so we could be gone from this place.

  Some say buildings have souls, the collected experiences of the many who’d gathered held between the walls that had survived so many years, however poorly. If that were the case, I had the distinct sense that the soul of the Cabot Manufacturing Company had rotted away as much as the wood framing had, leaving behind a residue of hopelessness and pain. I’d heard more than my share of horror stories about the working conditions back in those days long before unions and workers’ rights. I even found myself wondering if the darker patches staining a number of the heavy tables with Rorschach test–like blotches were bloodstains instead of mere signs of disuse and decay.

  I could feel both Mort and Seth growing as antsy as I was at being inside a structure that felt like it might collapse at any moment. We hadn’t spotted a convenient trail of footprints leading from Loomis Winslow’s Ford Five Hundred to the rickety, double-door entrance to the factory. But pinned under a rock just short of the stairs we did find a gum wrapper that matched a pack Mort had spotted on the car’s passenger seat. That made for a clear indication that Winslow had, in fact, entered the building after parking his car.

  “You’re thinking this detective came here to meet someone, Mrs. F.,” Mort said, his voice echoing in tinny fashion through the cavernous confines.

  “Why do you always tell me what I’m thinking?”

  “Because you wouldn’t tell me otherwise.”

  “Well, right now I’m thinking whoever he came here to meet last night ended up duct-taping him to the driver’s seat with the engine running.”

  “And then stuck around to remove it once the deed was done,” Mort picked up, drawing close to me with Seth on his heels. “That’s a long time to wait in the cold or even in whatever car the killer used to get here.”

  Sometimes in times like this, the lines between fiction and reality blur. I start thinking more like a writer and less like an investigator, how I might write the crime in question instead of solving it. It was Sherlock Holmes himself who once said, “We balance probabilities and choose the most likely. It is the scientific use of the imagination.” The imagination, I suppose, serves me as well when I’m investigating a real case as when I’m inventing a fictional one. But I feared in this particular instance I was veering more toward the latter, keeping in line with another famous Holmes quote, “Where there is no imagination there is no horror.”

  Because I saw horror in what had transpired in the hours it took Loomis Winslow to die and felt the presence within these dark, decrepit walls of a killer I truly hoped was long gone from Cabot Cove.

  Mort was busying himself with the floor, searching for some indication of where Winslow had met his killer. He kicked at the debris with his heavy shoes and smoothed parts of it aside when it seemed he might have happened upon something.

  For his part, Seth Hazlitt paced and fidgeted, wanting very much to be out of this place and back within the warm safety of Mort’s SUV.

  “Think I’ve got something, Mrs. F.,” Mort called out suddenly. “Come have a look.”

  He’d called me “Mrs. F.” for years after taking over for Amos Tupper as sheriff of Cabot Cove, before I finally broke him of the habit and got him to call me “Jessica” instead. I mean, when you’ve solved as many murders side by side as we have, the least you can expect is to be on a first-name basis. Only in recent months had he gone back to using “Mrs. F.” again, as much to annoy me, I thought, as anything else. Old habits not only die hard; sometimes they come back.

  I’d just started toward Mort when Seth Hazlitt banged into a ladder standing in the shadows not far from where Mort had crouched over a dusty patch of plank flooring. The ladder rattled, saved from toppling over only when Seth braced himself against it.

  “Easy there, Doc,” Mort said up to him. “Don’t want to end up needing to treat yourself.”

  Seth finally got the ladder steadied. “Place should have been condemned and leveled back when my mother was still alive.”

  I crouched alongside Mort, noting what he’d uncovered. “A footprint,” I said, making out the thinnest of shapes clinging to the contours formed by the dust caking.

  “And, wouldn’t you know, it matches our victim’s shoes.”

  I nodded, impressed. “You can tell?”

  “Well, I am a trained investigator, after all.” Mort started drawing patterns in the air over the footprint’s outline. “Same general tread, something between a sneaker and a shoe, exactly what he’s wearing. Same size, I’m guessing, too.”

  “Strange,” I heard myself say.
<
br />   “What?”

  “Tell me what you don’t see, Mr. Trained Investigator.”

  Mort rubbed his chin dramatically. “Hmm, another footprint? It would seem our poor Mr. Winslow came inside to meet someone who never showed.”

  “Why leave the comfort of his warm car at all, until whoever he was supposed to meet arrived? If Winslow did come here to meet someone, he must’ve had reason to believe they were already here.”

  “Like another vehicle in the lot outside?”

  “You read my mind, Mort.”

  “Makes up for the fact that he doesn’t read your books, Jess,” Seth couldn’t help but interject.

  “Anyway,” Mort said, pushing himself up to his feet, both knees cracking, “since there’s no other footprint in the general area, whoever was driving the second vehicle never met Loomis inside—at least not here, unless you can tell me what kind of man doesn’t leave any footprints.”

  “How about a ghost?”

  “A ghost only used to be a man. And they don’t leave footprints because they float around.”

  “That a scientific opinion, Mort?”

  “Close enough.”

  “Well, here’s another,” I said, steering my gaze along a strangely cleared path of plank flooring that seemed to extend all the way to the entrance. “I think somebody dragged his body from here back outside to his car.”

  Mort followed my gaze. “Sounds more like supposition to me, Mrs. F.”

  “Sometimes science and supposition are the same thing.”

  Still, something about that scenario didn’t sit right with me. Sherlock Holmes also once said, “There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.” And I had a feeling that I was missing something here.

  “What’s wrong, Mrs. F.?”

  “Nothing.”

  “That’s not your ‘nothing’ face.”

  I looked toward the ladder Seth had nearly toppled over. “What’s that ladder doing here?”

  “Way I see it, for somebody who once worked here to climb up on,” Mort replied, holding back a grin.